Everything about traveling on London’s underground transit system delighted me as a girl. In the 70s, my family lived forty miles outside London, and a favourite birthday treat was an outing to a blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum. We’d travel by main line train to London, then cross the city on the underground to Tottenham Court Road. Then we’d queue for hours in the museum forecourt for our tickets to gaze on the golden death mask of Tutankhamun, or the soft green jewels of the jade princess. For me, the London Tube is saturated with the glamour of those early visits.
I loved the dizzying descent by escalators into the city’s secret depths, the recorded voice at every station sternly reminding passengers to “Mind the gap” between train and platform, the very names of the stations: Blackfriars, Covent Garden, Bond Street.
Mastery of the Tube map was and is the key to the city, offered to all travelers. On to the jumble of London boroughs and wards, Harry Beck, the designer of the Tube map, imposed an intelligible order. The map looks like a cubist’s revision of a basket of knitting wool. Beck’s map respects topology, not geography: you can’t use it to guess how far it is to walk from Piccadilly Circus to Tower Hill, but it will tell any traveller exactly which line and direction to take to get from station to station.
The Tube is a microcosm of the city above. In this great, egalitarian conduit of London’s public transport system, Rastafarians and Anglican ministers rub shoulders on the Circle and District line. You can see salesgirls on lunch break and rich Ladies who Lunch, pinstriped bankers heading for the City and safety-pinned punks. Everyone is subject to the same rules of travel, the same jolts and delays. Indeed, Tube etiquette reflects the minimal moral pact on which the city is founded: you don’t have to make friends with the passenger standing next to you, but you must at least keep your elbows out of their face.
My brother’s tube station is Aldgate East in the East End of London. Although the area was badly damaged by German bombers in World War II, you can still find traces of the East End’s long history. Around the corner from my brother’s flat is a foundry that has been making bells since Shakespeare’s day. This is where the peal of Parliament’s Big Ben was cast, as well as Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. Successive waves of immigrants have made their mark: French Protestant Huguenots, East European Jews, and most recently, Muslim Bangladeshis mingle with longer established Cockneys. In nearby Brick Lane, there’s an all-night bagel shop and a butcher’s where you can buy halal meat. The area has been marked, too, by violent outbursts of racism and anti-semitism. My brother reports that, since the bombs of July 7th and 21st, the local mosque has been protected by a police cordon.
If you go online, you find can London’s blogosphere organized by Harry Beck’s map, with bloggers’ sites indexed to their nearest Tube station. From Stockwell, right after the first bombing on July 7, a blogger commented, “You can bomb us every fortnight but we AREN’T going anywhere. London has stood proudly for two thousand years and it takes a lot more to divide a city founded by immigrants.” An EMT who writes a daily blog from Whitechapel commented on July 21st, “Once more, most Londoners will look at what happened today, shrug their shoulders and make a cup of tea,” and, further along the District line at Aldgate East, a blogger summed up the terrorists’ bombing campaign in a dismissive soccer score, “London - 2, Bombers - 0.”